Sunstone Kirtland Memories

The LDS Church purchased some historic sites, documents, and artifacts from Community of Christ last week. If you read Mormon stuff on the internet, you’ve probably already heard plenty of commentary on the exchange. I have little to add to the commentary I’ve read. I feel especially bad for people I know in Community of Christ for whom this blow came out of left field.

Of the historic sites sold, the Kirtland Temple is probably the most recognizable. It’s also the most important to me personally. My family moved to the Midwest about a decade ago, and since then I’ve gotten to visit Kirtland a number of times. I’ve always been more impressed with Community of Christ’s presentations and tours at the temple than the LDS Church’s presentations and tours up the road at and around the Newel K. Whitney store. This is a common complaint, but it’s true: LDS tours are typically designed to use history as a prop to wring correlated spiritual experiences and missionary referrals out of visitors. Community of Christ tours, on the other hand, are more like actual historical tours where the guides try to give an overview of important events that happened at the sites, leaving the interpretation up to the visitors. I don’t have high hopes that the LDS Church’s tours of the Kirtland Temple will be anything other than the carefully correlated bland stuff that’s our usual.

Several of my Kirtland visits have been for Sunstone Kirtland conferences. These have always been generously hosted by Community of Christ at the visitor center next to the temple. I’m guessing the LDS Church won’t want to host such heresies there, so these conferences will likely be held at another venue, if they continue at all. I thought it might be fun, then, to reflect on some of the things I’ve enjoyed most at Sunstone Kirtland.

I do want to note that I’ve been to the main Sunstone conference in Salt Lake a few times too, and I’ve also enjoyed it a lot. It’s great that there are so many interesting people and different presentations. In Kirtland, I feel like we’ve rarely even had concurrent sessions, where you get to choose which you want to go to. But the small size is also a benefit in that it’s so much easier to meet someone if I want to. If I want to ask a presenter a follow-up question, or even just meet them, after a session at Kirtland, it’s always been easy.

Another aspect that was always great is that we’d start or end with a tour of the temple. These were always done by super knowledgeable people who could tell us all kinds of interesting things. At least once, Lachlan Mackay, a historian who’s on the Community of Christ Council of Twelve, did the tour. If you’ve been to the temple, you probably remember that the doors have been painted green because historical research indicates that that was their original color. If my memory is correct, Mackay told us on a tour that the exterior walls were originally slate gray, but he hadn’t been able to persuade everyone to go back to that color like with the doors.

Here are some conference sessions I particularly enjoyed. (To protect people’s privacy, I’m giving names of presenters and people I met at the conferences only if they’re public figures to some degree.)

• A presenter one year explained how she had purchased Bratz dolls and then re-made them to look like each of Joseph Smith’s wives. She showed the collection during her presentation. It was a great demonstration of how a number (41, or whatever it is) fails to capture just how many women he married.

• A musician favored us with a series of hilarious and pointed “Rejected EFY Songs.”
• Devry Anderson presented a couple of times on his book Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History. I don’t recall if this is something he said explicitly or just an impression I took away, but he made me hopeful that temple ceremonies might change in positive ways in the future, given how much tinkering has been done with them already over time.
• I loved seeing John Hamer present on how various spaces in the Kirtland Temple were used, and then showing how Community of Christ had focused on some aspects and the LDS Church on others as we’ve moved on to build our respective later temples. If I remember right, he said at least part of his motivation was responding to LDS visitors who asked “Why did you change the temple?”
• When Ordain Women was in the news, I enjoyed a couple of sessions on them and their actions and barriers to ending the female priesthood ban.

For me, even more than the often fascinating content of the sessions was meeting fun and interesting people. A lot of people always came from nearby, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but others came from all over. Sometimes I got to meet people who I already knew by reputation at least. Like one year, I sat by Margaret and Paul Toscano at dinner after the conference, and they were way less intimidating and more funny than I had expected. And another time, I got to sit with Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and Natasha Helfer at an after-conference dinner, and I got to be a total fanboy and tell them how much I admired their work. They were super kind and also hilarious, and just as wonderful in person as I had always thought them to be from their online presence.

Again, I’m not going to name most people to preserve their privacy, but every year, I’ve also run into people who I hadn’t known going in, but who I so much enjoyed getting to know, even briefly. I tend to be introverted, and new social situations often take a lot of energy out of me. But every year as I left the conference, I felt a kind of positive buzz as I thought back over the cool people I met and the fun conversations I was a part of. This is really a testament to how much I enjoyed myself, as I tend to be neurotic, and if I replay conversations in my head, it’s more often to castigate myself for saying dumb or offensive things than it is to remember how great they were. But I’ve always driven away happy.

I so appreciate Lindsay Hansen Park and Mary Ellen Robertson before her and all the other folks at Sunstone for putting these conferences on. I hope they can continue in some way in the future, but even if they can’t, I’m so happy for the ones I did get to attend.